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Coriolis - The Third Horizon Core Book
Publisher: Free League Publishing
by Christopher L. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 04/24/2022 03:05:23

Coriolis is my single favorite RPG after 10 years of GMing systems spanning both the pantheon of the hobby and lesser-known gems. In addition to an incredibly stylish universe in the Third Horizon--I particularly love the detail in the game's religion, Icon worship--Coriolis has approachable ship combat rules and the best table resource mechanic I've ever employed.

What I love:

  • Two peoples, the Firstcome and Zenithians, are separated by time but not space, both longing for the paradise lost of Al Ardha--Earth.
  • Spiritual-based fantasy mixed with high tech gives the same great vibes as Deep Space Nine, but with a totally different flair. Coriolis very much delivers on "1001 Nights in Space."
  • Technology in the Third Horizon has a distinct flavor. The computer skill is called "Data Djinn," implying you have a sort of attunement to the spirit of technology.
  • Icon worship. The religion permeates everything, even extending into the calendar (one month for each icon + 3 holy days). There's a sacrament for each icon. Daily prayers are mechanically relevant.
  • Darkness points. Unlike FATE's Fate Points or Genesys' Story Points, there is no limit to this resource on the player side. Players can gain a benefit from praying to the icons at any time, but it gives the GM a resource to introduce very interesting challenges--environmental disasters, system failures, jammed weapons, reinforcements, and mystical powers of the Dark Between the Stars...
  • Gear crunch is just right. It's not Shadowrun overcomplicated, but there are prices listed for climate-controlled tents, small land vehicles, concealable weapons, data chips, implants, and all manner of ship modules.
  • The book's art is phenomenal.
  • If you pick up the Atlas Compendium, the rollable tables for adventure generation are the best random tables I've come across. Even just reading them can spark the imagination.

What I don't love:

  • In my games, I've ruled PCs can't have Mystic Powers. I wanted to keep the magical elements of the setting a bit spooky and "beyond" the PCs.
  • The book's organization is less than excellent, but not to the point that it's unusable as a mid-session reference.
  • In particular, all the information required to make a portal jump is scattered throughout a few chapters. The frequency of bulk haulers (which gives an opportunity for a discount... somehow; it's not clear), the cost of having your course plotted (or the difficulty/consequences of plotting your own), the way your ship's traits play into everything, the time it takes to enter hypersleep--most of these are in the book, they're just not together. Some are only in tables. As a result, space combat is easier to handle than noncombat travel if you need to traverse multiple systems.


Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Coriolis - The Third Horizon Core Book
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Werewolf: the Forsaken 2nd Edition
Publisher: Onyx Path Publishing
by Chris L. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 08/25/2016 21:10:02

I read Apocalypse and Forsaken 1E, but didn't play either. This game, though, deserved to come down off the shelf and stay off, dammit.

In Werewolf: the Forsaken 2nd Edition, you play the ultimate predator. You don't have a sacred mission as in Apocalypse--not really. You're just a killer with a sense of community. That sense of community is omnipresent in both the core book and the first supplement, The Pack, and it comes up organically when roleplaying, which is nice.

Although I didn't have a lot of Werewolf experience, some of my players have, and they've noted with no small amount of pleasure a few differences here. In particular, they've hailed the changes to the Oath of the Moon over previous werewolf codes of honor. The meaning of respect your prey and the low honor the high; the high respect the low can be interpreted in enough ways to effectively be tailored to every group. For example, our ithaeur (shaman, effectively) is a smart-assed Brit that threatens spirits with inconveniences or worse; some groups might call that disrespecting prey, but we think it's fun.

My personal favorite part of the setting is the sheer variety of spiritual resonances. You don't just deal with the spirits of animals, or of objects, or even of emotions. Spirits of cybersecurity usher bit-motes on luminal pilgrimages. Spirits of HIV crowd out and suffocate spirits of excitement at a South African cultural celebration. A spirit of the local college's biology department, bloated with funding, trades essence with spirits of scientific observation to taste their secrets. The spirits of a company's shares swarm over the corporate spirit itself, commanding it in a terrible cacophony. And these ideas are just from the first few sessions!

If you're new to Werewolf, buy this. According to my players, if you're 20-year Werewolf veterans, you should buy it too.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Werewolf: the Forsaken 2nd Edition
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Chronicles of Darkness
Publisher: Onyx Path Publishing
by Chris L. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 08/25/2016 20:53:22

A much-needed update to the previous iteration of the World of Darkness. This review is targeted at people with some knowledge of nWoD 1E.

Highlights: -Much better experience system that rewards participation and roleplay, while also simplifying trait purchase costs. -Social Maneuvering system that, while not perfect, provides a mechanical framework to schmoozing. GMing this aspect for social characters always felt a little like pulling stuff out of your ass before, but no longer! -New combat mechanics make firearms much better, which makes sense, while simultaneously widening the gap between humans and the supernatural templates. -The chapter on "Horrors" provides a great framework for creating antagonists that don't fit into one of the other supernatural settings. This is completely underappreciated, IMO, because it's a perfectly streamlined system that could be integrated into any Chronicles game, human PCs or otherwise.

Biggest complaint: The Clue systems make for lazy roleplay and GMing. It's always better to let the players decide what's a relevant clue, and then to direct their investigation as they see fit. "You look in the cabinet and find X," is less compelling than describing the cabinets, letting the players decide to look in them (or in the other room that you didn't expect them to investigate!) and then describing what they found "through their own intuition." I dunno, there's probably a way to use the Clue system without ruining scenes, but I can't figure it out. And that makes it a bad, or at least poorly communicated, system.

Net opinion: The new experience system alone would make the new ruleset worth using. Adding in Social Maneuvering and the Horrors chapter are just delicious icing on the cake.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Chronicles of Darkness
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Changeling: The Lost
Publisher: White Wolf
by Chris L. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 08/25/2016 20:31:08

This review is of FIRST EDITION CtL, not the upcoming (as of Aug 2016) second edition compatible with the God Machine Chronicles/Chronicles of Darkness.

Changeling is a game about stolen lives and beautiful madness, as the tagline says, but it actually supports a surprisingly broad array of moods. One game might be silly, with clockwork doll-girls and an ogrish professor. Another might be rooted in gore horror, with a cannibal chef on the loose. You could run a modern day retelling of legends of old, wherein a hero must go on an epic quest through desert kingdoms of dream to save the soul of his firstborn, which was stolen by trickery. My year-long chronicle focused more on the arcane nature of the Wyrd, the promise-binding source of fae power with a fickle and unknowable consciousness. All of these are equally valid tales in the CtL framework.

One thing that sets apart CtL from many other Chronicles settings is the uniqueness of its primary antagonists: the True Fae. True Fae are far more powerful than most antagonists in the World of Darkness. They make deals with elements of reality (and nether-reality) which give them superpowers, for crying out loud. They are literally made of the Wyrd, and are one with their domains. As such, the idea that each Changeling somehow "escapes" from his or her Keeper pulls players in from the start: they didn't escape. They were set free. They just don't know why, yet.

The Pledge system is pleasantly overpowered in CtL 1E. It's a great callback to fairy tales of yore that giving one's word--or more severely, promising on one's true name--makes a sprite vulnerable, but also empowered.

That said, I'm not that hyped for second edition. It's reworked the setting and mechanics to de-emphasize "promises" and bring up "the Story" in its place, celebrating fae as manifestations of legend. As someone who really got into CtL from imagining a bunch of good and evil Rumpelstilzkins roaming about, trying to hide their true names and morals such that they couldn't be used against them, I'm just a bit disappointed in those choices.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Changeling: The Lost
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RED AEGIS Roleplaying Game
Publisher: Vorpal Games
by Chris L. [Verified Purchaser]
Date Added: 07/11/2016 16:04:16

This is an interesting 4X-RPG hybrid, and the pdf has truly fantastic art, but the presentation of the rules is so haphazard that I can't in good faith recommend it to any but the most persistent readers. While the book's presentation might guide you through the process of filling out a character sheet, knowing how to actually play the game is another matter entirely. The actions one can take during one's turn are spread through multiple chapters, with limitations on those actions listed in charts in yet other chapters, and the headings of those charts are misleading except in the context of yet other chapters. The complexity of the game combined with its poor presentation is utterly unacceptable for a game that strongly suggests that each player plays the role of GM during the campaign. It's simply impractical, and I would be surprised if a single group outside their playtesters actually plays the game that way.

For example, one can perform a "basic action" which is contained in its own chapter. That's fine. Except there are also Caste abilities, World Anchor abilities, Landmark abilities, Follower abilities, and Relic abilities to which that chapter doesn't even allude. The System Mastery chapter lists other abilities, some of them crucial such as enacting martial law to decrease Unrest. The Culture tables limit the use of some of these abilities in ways that are rarely mentioned or completely absent in the body text; for example, Progress Equilibrium is only described once (and is actually violated in the intro "example play" summary!). The Wealth Culture lists "Max Landmarks," but that's actually double the maximum landmarks per territory, as the listed value is supposed to be the maximum landmarks permissible in the Tribe Bastion. These are just a small sampling of the egregious miscommunications present in the text, and I won't even start in on the typos from leftover placeholder terms (e.g., a Scion's physical defense being called Resilience in some places and Fortitude in others, or Discovery and Exploration being used as equivalent terms).

IN SUMMARY: The game itself is promising to 4X fans and, to me, represents a "rules heavy" alternative to one of my favorite recent games, Microscope. The book has beautiful art, but the text requires a slow read front-to-back, and even then, probably requires any serious player to reorganize the information into a personal cheat-sheet. Hardcore rules-lawyers only.



Rating:
[3 of 5 Stars!]
RED AEGIS Roleplaying Game
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